


After The War

by ladybugwarrior



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), References to Depression, Steve doesn't cope well, Thanos is damn lucky i don't live in that world because i would kick his tinky winky ass, There will be no comfort until Avengers 4, i write fanfic to cope, nothing to descriptive
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-29
Updated: 2018-04-29
Packaged: 2019-04-29 12:27:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14472741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladybugwarrior/pseuds/ladybugwarrior
Summary: INFINITY WAR SPOILERSSteve's been down this road many times before, but it hurts every time.





	After The War

**Author's Note:**

> I'm dead inside, so I wrote this to bring everyone down with me. I saw Infinity War Thursday night and started writing this about an hour later. I WAS READY FOR STEVE TO DIE NOT BUCKY. Anyways, it's been a while since I've written Stucky fic, so if anyone who follows me remembers those days they will remember I like my stucky fic painful as possible. Also, if you're familiar with my fic All The Roses Falling and wondering where the hell the two sequels are, I forgot to write them, but I do have ideas for them and hopefully I can get part two out this summer. However, part three will have to wait until after Avengers 4. I mean if you've read Being a Superhero (Being a Hero? what did I name that fic? I could check but I won't) then you know that I write everything sad as I possibly can. Oh, if you want to know what I was listening to when I wrote this song I'll put a few songs that got me in the mood down below.  
> Even Great Things- Elliot Moss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jap_BNQ1Bw  
> Long Gone- Mary Epworth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IsdlvHTWjQ  
> Beloved- April Smith and the Great Picture Show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozN4tIhk7ZA

Death always used to hit Steve the same way. When he heard the news that his father would never come back, he fell into a swirling pit of grey. He saw no deviation of color in the world; he saw nothing at all but outlines through a sheer curtain. People would come and go. They would speak sometimes, but his ears were filled with cotton. The world waisted away, and he wasted away with it. He got ill multiple times, ill from a grief that attacked him in a kind, even merciful, way. Grief attacked him but didn’t let him feel, and Steve couldn’t help but be thankful no matter how many times he was told that wasn’t healthy. When he mother died it was the same. The curtain returned, thicker and darker than before. Once again, he fell in but he couldn’t bring himself to see the wrong in that. No, he felt angry that he hadn’t been taken first. Most people said that he was born to die, not outlive everyone he cared about. Everyone died, but he couldn’t ever seem to follow that rule. There were times he wanted to, but he was never allowed.

Bucky always kept him alive. Every time Steve lost himself behind the curtains, Bucky pulled them open and let the light in. He reminded Steve how the sun felt on his skin with a smile. He would sing to Steve when he fell ill and they were curled up together on a thin sweat-soaked sheet. Bucky Barnes, the man couldn’t carry a tune, but hearing his voice wrap around soft lyrics was enough to keep Steve fighting. He was always enough. Why can’t Steve keep Bucky, make him selfishly his? They could have lived together simply, far away from anyone’s reach. Curled around each other until they became the same being.  Steve could have wasted away without a care if it had been with Bucky at his side.

The first time he died, Steve had watched until Bucky became little more than a speck in a valley’s dense fog. Bucky’s scream, like the tinnitus he once had, rang in his ears. The scream never left, he heard Bucky’s fear and kept it with him like a ghost. The grief was different that time, the lingering specter of Bucky’s fear told him that. The curtain wasn’t forming, and that terrified Steve. Feeling the raw wound being torn and pulled open, the horrific pain, Bucky’s damn scream, it all haunted him.

Drinking would have helped. Bucky had drunk when the world got too much for him to handle. But when Steve got to the bar, nothing worked. He took shot after shot after shot. He chugged down full bottles of the most expensive whiskey they had, and he threw them at the wall when the pain became too much. He ripped tables into splinters with his bare hands. He pummeled the brick walls until the moonlit street was visible and his knuckles bled. The knuckles healed in minutes, so he tried again. Bucky’s scream never faded.

Steve assumed he would be joining Bucky in death, but he ended up meeting him again in life. When that muzzle fell off and Steve saw Bucky’s face, the screaming stopped for the first time in years.

“Bucky?”

They were both corrupted, Steve by his grief and anger, and Bucky by the hands of the enemy. They were as unrecognizable to each other as they were to themselves. So, when Bucky ran away, Steve wasn’t surprised. He would have been confused if he had woken up in that hospital bed with Bucky smiling down on him. All Bucky probably wanted was to be left alone, to become the ghost that he should have been, but Steve couldn’t condemn Bucky o a life of constant confusion and paranoia. He set out to find Bucky, but he always got there too late. He’s always too late.

The Sokovia Accords weren’t handled well, he knows that, lives with the guilt. But once he saw Bucky, only a few feet away looking so goddamn nervous., he stopped caring. The Avengers were his family, but Bucky had become so much more. They were undefinable together, a tragic romance that looked death in the eye and said, ‘not today.’ They were stubborn. They were lovers. They were soldiers fighting the same war or fighting against each other. They were too much and too little, a caravan driving off a cliff, and a stolen moment in the winter of 1941.

They were never enough.

The Avengers fell apart. He didn’t blame Tony; Steve’s intimate with death, and he knows the way grief erodes the rational mind. Feeling helpless and vulnerable was part of having your world destroyed with the snap of the fingers. That was how he felt when Bucky told him that he wanted to be put back in cryo. Inside, his mind wanted to beg him to stay, they had lost so much time already. But he left Bucky freeze in the end. Peace of mind had alluded Bucky for seventy years, Steve could wait until Bucky was ready for him, for when the war was over. He thought they had all the time in the world.

“Steve?”

One syllable warped by confusion and despair. Steve saw Thanos snap his fingers and knew what that meant, but, God, why is it always one of them. Always just one of them. Why was it never him first, and why does Bucky have to take all the pain and forced to leave. Steve almost doesn’t turn around; he can’t bear the idea of having to watch the man he loves leave him again. He can pretend if he doesn’t turn around, pretend that Bucky will always be right there behind him. If he didn’t turn around, Steve could close his eyes and pretend they were in a forest deep in Italy or France before time chewed them up and spit them out. God, how he wants to pretend, but he can’t. Sam and Natasha are right, Steve was a masochist.

Steve doesn’t know what he expected to see. Bucky lying dead and grey on the ground, the life drained from him. That would have been better, he would have had a body to cling to his chest as he wailed, one to bury while he pulled at his hair like Achilles had after the death of Patroclus. But death is cruel, and he watches Bucky fall apart piece by piece.

“No, no, no,” Steve pleads and runs over to Bucky. When Bucky falls because his legs have disappeared, Steve catches him. He cradles Bucky’s face and tries to memorize the way Bucky’s skin feels against his fingertips.

“Steve?” Bucky’s eyes search for something in Steve’s. An answer? Steve didn’t have one.

Bucky’s almost gone, a material like ash that was once his body swirls around them and settles on the ground. He has seconds left. Seconds to tell Bucky that this isn’t the end of them, that Steve would get him back. But there isn’t enough time for words. A hundred years and they never had enough time. So, Steve kisses him. He kisses Bucky and hopes that everything he wants to say, every reassurance, and every promise translates. He hopes because the last of Bucky disappears before he can pull away.

He kneels in, what are they? They aren’t ashes or dust, but they are Bucky. He’s scattered in the dirt seventy-years and half the world away from home. All that remains is his gun, a weapon. Is that all they amount to? Were they just weapons, because Steve thought they were two boys from Brooklyn who fell in love. Two boys in love, why can’t that be what they were? That was always enough for Steve, but the world always wanted more from them.

The curtain stays away like the last time Bucky died, but Steve embraces its absence, feels the lesion on his soul. He’ll rub salt in the wound, anything to feed the rage building inside. Thanos should have killed him because he was dead now. It didn’t matter where he hid, how far away he was. He killed Bucky. Thanos doesn’t know what that means, but he will. They are Steve and Bucky, and their war isn’t over until they both make it back home. Someday they would both find their way home.

* * *

 

“Steve?” Bucky asked. “What are you thinking about?”

His arms wrapped around Bucky tighter. This was their time after the rest of the Howling Commandos had fallen asleep and the fire still burned bright. Steve had been staring into the fire, not speaking, and he was unaware of the smile on his face. He looked down at Bucky, pressed a kiss to his hairline.

“Marry me.”

Bucky shifted to look into his blue eyes, a heartbroken sort of smile played on his lips. “You know we can’t do that.”

“This war’s going to change the world, Buck. Who knows what will happen.”

“Not that,” Bucky said, his heartbreak spread to his eyes. “No church would ever marry us.”

“Forget the church. We’ll figure something out because we always do. Marry me.” Steve smiled like the world was meant to be ignored.

“We’re in a war.”

“Then after the war,” Steve said. “I’ll wait for you, James Buchanan Barnes. Marry me.”

Bucky pulled Steve down for a kiss, and he made them a stolen moment in a forest in 1941. Steve could feel him smile, and was certain Bucky felt the same thing. When he pulled away their foreheads touched; Steve’s thumb ran down Bucky’s lips. Everything was quiet and peaceful for one moment.

“After the war?” Bucky asked.

“After the war,” Steve promised. He didn’t know any better.

**Author's Note:**

> I made Bucky's death a little longer for the angst, sorry  
> cry with me about infinity war dontfeedthebabytigers.tumblr.com


End file.
